Mumbo Gumbo (5 page)

“No,” I stuttered, shocked. “Never.” Can you believe this guy? How corny was that? What sort of green, new-in-town, stars-in-her-eyes, aspiring-actress type did he take me for?

“You’re laughing,” he said, amused. “I mean it, Madeline. You’re a highly regarded chef in your own right, yes? You are a hot young Hollywood caterer. You are simply perfect.” Howie spoke in a low growl. He did not stop looking at me.

“He’s right,” Susan said, a hint of excitement in her voice.

Nell and Stell kind of gasped, taken in by the power of Chef Howie’s voice.

Here I was, my native skepticism on hyperalert, but how flattering, really, that Howie knew about my culinary business. Of course I was an event planner, not merely a caterer, but he still seemed to know me by my reputation.

I realized they were all staring at me, smiling at me, seeing me in perhaps a whole new light. I felt myself begin to flush and I brushed my long curly hair off of my hot neck.

Just my luck, I would get discovered and be on the brink of my big break just as I was on the verge of being thrown in prison for breaking federal game-show statute 509 or some such number. And, of course,
much as I resisted everyone else’s infernal dream about a career in front of the camera, I suppose it would be preferable to fifty years in the slammer.

Howie was waiting for my answer.

“What sort of thing did you have in mind?” I asked, annoyed to realize my voice did not sound anywhere near as skeptical as I had surely intended it to.

“Listen to Chef Howie,” he said, referring to himself in the third person. If that wasn’t a clear signal to
stop
listening, I’d never heard one. And yet, I continued to listen. I have no excuse. I just wanted to hear what he thought I might be able to do. Just in case this game-show writing gig was about to be flushed down the tubes due to my exceeding stupidity regarding closing doors.

“I think you should sing, Madeline,” he said, with a completely straight face. “You could become the singing chef. It would be a sensation.”

Yes. Right. I’m afraid with ideas like that one, I had better see what I could do to salvage the writing gig after all.

S
tella, Nellie, Susan, and Chef Howie waited for my response.

“That’s not why I’m here working on
Food Freak,”
I said modestly. “I may be the one person in Hollywood who has no Hollywood dream.”

“Really?” Chef Howie asked, teasing.

“Really. I have no desire to be discovered,” I said, smiling. “And, truth be known, I don’t sing. At all. But that’s awfully nice. Thanks anyway, Howie.”

“No, no!” Stell and Nell insisted in unison.

I was startled at their insistence. Me? A singing chef? It was really…

Stell said, “It’s
Chef
Howe.”

“What?”

Nell continued in a lowered voice, “We all say
Chef
Howie.”

“All his fans call him Chef Howie,” Stella explained. “It’s simpler.”

“Oh,” I said. “You’re not joking.”

Howie, with a dashing smile, winked at me. Yes indeedy.
Chef
Howie. Right.

The door banged open and we all looked up, expecting Greta. But this time, a tall, snaky-thin woman
entered. She wore black leather jeans and a zebra print halter top, not actually appropriate for office attire, but then again, not actually appropriate for
any
kind of attire after, say, 1983. She had the sort of skin that had no doubt spent many a summer slathered in cocoa butter. It had the leathery look for which one pays extra when buying expensive luggage.

“Chef Howie,” she said, her voice like a cheese grater. “What the hell are you doing here? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Hey,” Howie said, “chill. I’m waiting for Greta.”

Susan did her introduction thing. Susan was indispensable. “Fate Finkelberg, meet Madeline Bean, our newest writer.”

“Fay, nice to meet you,” I said.

“I’m
Fate,
” she corrected. “F-A-T-E.”

I avoided a spontaneous smirk and congratulated my self-control.

“A new writer?” Fate turned to Susan and her lips curled downward. “You mean Greta replaced Timmy Stock already? Shame on her!” Fate exuded disapproval and dissatisfaction, elevating the concept of negative energy to an art form.

“Madeline is just helping us out. It’s temporary,” Susan explained.

I checked out Fate Finkelberg, who was frankly wearing too much jewelry and exposing too much old skin to be taken very seriously. She might have been something twenty-five years back, but by now it was difficult to tell what. She was trying to pull off that disco look and I shuddered to imagine that she had been stuck in those platform shoes for the better part of three decades. I took in her streaked blond hair, cut
in the same shaggy style that Rod Stewart used to wear long ago. I turned to study Howie again. He looked to be young thirties and I did the mental math. Fate must be Chef Howie’s mother.

As for Howie, with his thick brown hair and his devilish grin, there was nothing I could find wrong with his looks. In
People
magazine’s “Sexiest People” issue, they said Chef Howie was bringing back Elvis sideburns single-handedly. His hands were rough and scarred, the way tough-guy chef’s hands always are, very sexy. He could have been a rock musician with that lean build and those clear green eyes. Very badboy chic. Some insisted it was Howie’s hip, casual machismo in the kitchen that had ratcheted
Freak
’s ratings higher and higher. Staring at him now, up close and personal, I couldn’t say I’d argue.

“Come on,” Fate said, turning back to Howie. “Let’s go to the trailer. We need to talk. One of these girls can tell Greta you want her.”

Howie seemed very used to following her orders, because without a murmur of dissent or skipping a beat, he told us, “Ladies, I’m outta here. Tell Greta I need her right away. Good to meet you, Maddie.” He gave me a slow TV star smile, and winked. Twice.

“See you later…Howie.” I know. I am bad.

Fate Finkelberg turned slowly; her light eyes traveled over my white jeans and blue tank top, stopping for a moment as she checked out my unruly red/blond hair, which, for once, I was wearing down. It’s curly and heavy, and when I’m cooking, I almost always pull it back in a braid or clip it off my neck. As a newly minted game-show writer, however, I was experimenting with the whole long pre-Raphaelite hair
look. It was a pain to fuss with, but I’m trying to get into the pain. Fate Finkelberg, queen of the spiky shag cut, was not impressed. At all.

“You call him
Chef
Howie, sweetie pie, or you’re out of a job.” Ms. Finkelberg didn’t raise her voice and didn’t blink. She was taking me on, perhaps hoping I’d snap at her bait and get myself fired.

What to do…I was being ordered around by
Chef
Howie’s psycho mother. Something inside of me just wanted to resist. But I shouldn’t. I knew that. I did. I knew it.

Old bat Finkelberg held my gaze, a slight smile playing at her lips. Stella felt the need to fill the silence, explaining, “Madeline is just getting the hang of things around here, Fate. We’re trying to fill her in.”

She looked nervously at Nellie, who chimed in with, “That’s true!”

What terrifically weird dynamic ruled this world? I hated this sort of power play. I tilt at windmills. I tilt at Chef Howie and his mom! This desire I have to oppose idiocy is one of my weaker people skills. It’s a very good thing that I am my own boss in my own event-planning company, I realized. But I was not my own boss now. And the truth was, I needed this particular job. With that in mind, I used what little maturity I could scrape together and struck a nonresistant pose. Alas, my act of restraint was not a complete success. I couldn’t keep my honest eyebrow from arching a fraction of an inch higher than its more mature mate. Ms. Finkelberg, taking note of my absent apology and my uneven brows, smiled to herself and turned quickly, following Howie out of the room.

“Chef Howie’s mom does not love me,” I said as soon as the door closed.

Susan Anderson broke into a delighted smile. “Madeline!”

“You are perfect!” Stella said.

“Perfect,” Nellie said.

Susan’s eyes twinkled. “Fate Finkelberg is not Chef Howie’s mom.”

“She’s his wife,” said Nellie.

Oh, man. The handsome young chef and the driedout old showgirl with the fist of iron—there had to be some terrific story behind this bizarre Hollywood marriage.

The door to Greta’s office opened and in walked Greta Greene herself.

“Greta!” Stell said. “Oh good!”

“Thank God you’re back,” Nell said. “We have got to talk.”

“Look at the time,” Stell said, seamlessly taking over. “We’ve got a major contestant problem. We are terribly late getting today’s contestants to the set, but—”

Greta interrupted her. “I know. I know. Everything’s running late today. I need to talk with Madeline first. Then I’ll come find you two and we’ll straighten out your contestants.”

Nell still looked worried. “We’re running so far behind, I’m—”

Greta gave them both a sunny smile. “It’s just that kind of day. I’ll be by later, okay?”

What could the two contestant coordinators say? Even Susan, who was standing by, waiting her turn to ask Greta a question, seemed surprised. It was rare for Greta to seem so little concerned at being behind schedule. Nell and Stell, no less baffled, left the office.

“Susan,” Greta said, looking down at her notepad. “How many scripts are out now?”

“How many have I handed out to our crew today?” Susan asked. “Nineteen, why?”

Greta pantomimed, spreading her arms out and then scooping them up again.

Susan tensed, like she had just been pinched by a sudden, but very familiar, pain. “Changes?”

“We’ll talk later, okay?”

Scripts were distributed to the show’s director and all the behind-the-scenes technical people in the morning on tape days. Any changes made after that distribution were issued as separate pages, each subsequent version a new color so everyone could keep track of the fact that the green copy of page eleven was fresher than the pink one, and so on. The only reason scripts were collected outright, like Greta was now requesting, was when major revisions were in the works. And on the day of a taping, such an ominous move signaled a fight-against-the-clock workload for the head PA.

“Let’s gather them all quickly, please,” Greta said, and added, “I’ve got Advil or Tylenol, take your pick.”

“I’ve got my own,” Susan said, across the office and reaching for the door. She was a veteran of these wars and had already donned her professional face. Before she left the office she turned and added, “Chef Howie and Fate were looking for you. So you may want to save those painkillers for yourself.” Then she quietly left the room.

Greta sat down behind her desk. “Maddie, is it hot in here or has the stress just pushed me into menopause?”

“What happened to Tim’s office? Have you figured it out?”

“Not yet,” she said. “I’ve been too busy working out what to do with our schedule.” She tapped a gold
pen on her notepad. “I have an idea, but I’m going to need help.”

I nodded.

“We have to be very careful how we handle this. It will only bring the dogs of hell down upon us if the staff hears about what happened in Tim’s office.”

Did no one in this line of work consider understatement?

“I mean,” Greta said, rubbing her hands together as if to get warm, “we don’t actually know what did happen, do we? In all that mess, we can’t even be sure it was the show material they were after.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe someone was angry with Tim. I thought it over.

“You see, Maddie, we are living in a fishbowl. The tabloids are looking for dirt. We’re vulnerable here.”

It was a particularly fetching picture, us the fish, our brewing scandal the crud at the bottom of the bowl, and what, I wondered, was the little statue of Neptune with his tiny trident? No matter. Greta, a great one to offer up metaphors, was on to another one.

“It’s like we’re Mr. Clean but sometimes there is just too much dirt for even Mr. Clean to, um, clean. We work so damn hard to keep our show beyond reproach, to earn our good name.”

While the jaded among us might question whether a game show might indeed have a “good name” in need of protection, I admired Greta and her desire to salvage the good name of hers.

“You’re afraid of what
Entertainment Tonight
will do with this story?”

“Of course I am. I’m embarrassed. I’m worried. We’re the
Titanic,
Maddie. And out there are icebergs.”

“Like this office break-in,” I suggested.

“Right. News of our office break-in would be disastrous.
Food Freak
is big, but we could sink. It happened on my watch, after all. And Artie would just about die if this show went down.” Greta’s voice got softer as she toted up the potential damage. “And the network would take a lot of flack. And the whole genre of game shows would appear to be untrustworthy, again, like ocean liners were back in the old days. Can you imagine?”

Almost seasick with symbolism, I shook my head in sympathy.

“And I’m afraid,” she continued, even more kindly, “it wouldn’t be at all comfortable for you, Madeline. It was the office you were assigned to that was vandalized.”

Of course, she was right. I couldn’t even remember if I’d heard the damn door click shut. “I’m so sorry, Greta.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” she said, but her tone of voice reminded me of what one might say to the poor underpaid fool up on deck whose job it was to watch out for ice.

I did blame myself. In only my first week of working on the country’s most popular TV show, ladies and gentlemen, I had made quite a contribution. I might have destroyed the network’s biggest asset by failing to pull a lousy door a quarter of an inch tighter. “Well,” I said, hoping for some hope, “where do we actually stand? What is missing from Tim’s office?”

Greta sighed. “It will take hours to go through that mess. I don’t know what exactly Tim kept in the office to begin with, so I can’t know what might be gone
now. I’ve tried to call Tim, again and again, but there is still no answer on any of his phones.”

“It might not be so bad,” I suggested.

Greta looked resigned. “As long as the script for today’s show was there, we’re in deep trouble. We’ll never know if they looked at it or not. We have to scrap that show.”

“The script,” I said, thinking of all that work now gone completely to waste.

“The script,” she echoed. “Anyone could have seen the questions and the menus and the secret recipes we had planned to spring on the players in today’s taping.”

I nodded. In
Food Freak,
the teams could earn bonus advantages by correctly answering questions about gourmet cooking. In the second half of the game, they had to cook special surprise recipes. If one team had the questions in advance, they could easily win all the extra bonus ingredients. And if they knew in advance what recipes they’d have to prepare, they could plot out their strategies ahead of time.

Greta looked miserable. “I’m really royally screwed here,” she said, shaking her delicate head. “Think Queen Victoria. Wasn’t she the one who had eleven children?”

“I believe she had nine,” I said.

“Still, I made my point,” Greta said. Then she checked her notes and went on. “But I think we may just have a chance to get through this without it all hitting the fan. Will you help?”

“Of course.”

“First, you’ll sign the 509 form immediately, which will take care of the show’s obligations to adhere to all the federal regulations, okay?”

“Of course.”

“And, clearly, we can’t tell anyone we had a break-in.”

I looked around Greta’s corner office. It was decorated in beautiful, classic furniture. The art on the walls looked expensive. She had earned the right to call the shots on a big television series, I knew, and she also had a lot to protect.

“What will you do about today’s taping?” I asked.

“We have to cancel it,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t really believe I’m saying this. It’s unheard of. We never cancel.”

“The show must go on.”

“Do you know why?” she asked, instructing me kindly.

“Tradition?” I guessed. “There’s no business like show business?” I was pretty sure there was a classic show tune that had this sort of thing explained.